A World in which Improv is Key, Part 2

(For Part one, click here)


***

When my surgeon, the stranger who would soon know parts of me no one else had ever touched, told me I had to have a bypass immediately, one of the questions that went through my mind was “Does this mean my chest will be cut open?” I didn’t ask this out loud. Of course, I knew the answer.

Getting to a patient's heart requires that the chest is cauterized and cut open at the same time with a tool designed to do both at once. Once the skin is open and peeled back, a rotary saw is used to cut through the sternum. Imagine how the ribs must feel, once the tension is released and they open up for the first time! Imagine how strange the patient must look once the ribs are cranked open, the arms flung down off the table, and--if she is a woman--her breasts flopped unnaturally, drooping abandoned toward opposite sides of the room.

I admire those who know in advance all the details they are in for and still show up at the hospital. Though my curiosity got the better of me, and I started watching videos of bypass surgeries as soon as I got home from the hospital (what would I have done without  YouTube I have to wonder), had I known the details of my surgery before, I can only imagine the nightmares.

If open-heart surgery happens “on pump,” which is still usually the case, especially with grave emergencies, the patient's heart is stopped, and two cannulas connect the body to the heart-lung machine. The cannulas become the vein and the artery through which blood circulates out of the body, into the pump, back into the body, over and over again as it bypasses the heart and lungs.  Her heart and lungs have been stopped and machines are doing all the work; Essentially, for that time, the patient on the operating table is dead.

***

One Sunday, after I had been working with Ran for more than a year, and had been at his apartment through the afternoon drafting the letters I would go home, type up, then later that week send out to people who would likely be just as surprised at getting a real physical letter as they were to get compliments and heartfelt advice from someone they didn’t know, or at the most only knew of, Ran told me he needed to go take a bath. He was headed out later and needed to get ready, wash off the day, put on some good clothes, but I was welcome to stick around and play the piano.

In my memory I reconstruct this scene and hear him telling me that he’s going to see a Hitchcock double feature. I want to give him the gift of that: to write for him a night of film noir on the town. I’ll make it a Sunday night of Tippi Hedren in The Birds, Janet Leigh in Psycho, and Ran Blake, Boston piano man extraordinaire in his navy blue trench coat, leaning forward, hands on his knees, chin in his hands, sitting in the dark theater in Brookline, surrounded by friends, right at the edge of his seat. Melanie Daniels is making her way across the bay when a gull pecks her on the forehead, destroying her carefully coiffed hair, warning us of what’s to come, even if for a moment we are fooled into thinking that handsome Mitch, who rushes to her aid when she gets to the dock, just might be able to save her. And Marion Crane—heart pounding, hands gripping tighter around the steering wheel than they've probably ever gripped anything in her life (even her lover), drives in the rain with all that money, trying so hard to find a way out of her mundane life, and all-the-while repeatedly meeting her guilty conscience in the rear-view mirror. And Ran's absolutely loving every minute of it, even though he knows the dialogue and soundtrack by heart and has known for years how the stories will end. How Melanie will get attacked by birds, but get to keep her man, while poor Marion’s blood will keep swirling right on down the drain, no matter how much you wish it wouldn't, and all that money gets nice and soggy in the swamp while Norman stands there watching the last bit of the car disappear into the muddy water.

No matter how many times he’s seen them, Ran will watch enthralled. Will completely devour the discordant notes of their celluloid bodies and lives. Because other than his worship of the ear and the piano, for him there was film noir—its shadows, its twists, its heaviness, its sounds. It was the achy foundation of so many of his compositions, the moody thread connecting his days, the shape of his black composition bag that became his graphic trademark, the theme of the infamous musical and art soirées he organized in various spots around Cambridge and Boston. And, of course, it was the perfect companion to Jack Daniels (Ran introduced me to whiskey served neat, which I still love, though sometimes I wonder if I stop to drink it as often as I should). 

And once the birds  seem to have mellowed out and Norman Bates is sent away, Ran and his fellow movie goers will get up from their seats, walk out of the theater, and head on to Khao Sarn at Coolidge Corner for a late dinner and rounds of toasts and conversation. Melanie, Mitch, Marion, and Norman will come and go between the miang kum, the pad thai, the ginger fish, the coconut drinks with umbrellas, the sticky rice with mango. Like all the other places in Boston that open their doors wide for him, Ran is well-known at Khao Sarn. The owner of Khao Sarn has even hosted pre-noir-event parties there.

***

­­

Before heading off to get ready, Ran suddenly suggests we have our first piano lesson. We had been talking about it for a while, but the two of us had been so busy, we hadn’t gotten around to it. While I played, he would listen. He would leave the bathroom door open slightly so he could hear me and respond. It was time for me to begin my worship of the ear, my own praise to that small puckered, curly-qued, dried apricot thing that quickly becomes bizarre if you ever really stop to look at it protruding from the side of someone’s head. He was convinced he could teach me to train my ears. Convinced my apricots, which I was certain were tone deaf, had that power too. 

I had played piano as a girl for years—he knew that—but no more than in that slavish, route way that begins when a child is forced by one or both parents to sit in front of sheet music and plunk out the notes one by one, while getting smacked, chastised, occasionally praised but often goaded (depending on the disposition of the particular teacher and the vicissitudes of the day). “What a wonderful sight-reader you are!” my first teacher with his fantastically fat, broomy, gray mustache told me, before commenting on my deplorable rhythm as I sat there trying so hard with back straight, wrists up, fingers precisely, classically curled. A good sight reader: I was proud. I'm sure I shared this with my mother when I got home. And later I was even a decent player. By the time I was in high school,  friends heard me and were impressed. But that was about it. Nothing more. There was emptiness about it. I wouldn’t have said that at the time. Wouldn’t have known HOW to say that, wouldn’t have even realized there was a problem, but later, when I encountered the music of Ran Blake, Keith Jarrett, and George Russell; as I fell deep into the heavy down-noted chords of Thelonius Monk; as I stepped through the fissures they created and basked in the music on the other side, I knew the difference. I had never really played at all. Chopin’s preludes and waltzes by route, stiff memorization didn’t count. I was a great imitator. Nothing more. 

And now Ran was telling me to play for him the first notes of George Russell’s “Strastusphunk.” His words were something along the lines of: Just start. Work it out. And do it completely by ear.

To be continued ...

A World in Which Improv is Key, Part 1

About 10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I worked for a piano player named Ran. Every Sunday around 12:30 I hopped on the T (the Greenline from Lechmere bound inward to BU) with a new book in hand. The thirty-five-minute-or-so trip was the perfect amount of time to be seduced into swimming amorously around inside the waters of an excellent plot to the rhythm of the click-clack, back-and-forth, hum-sway of the train and the in and out, get up, get down motions of its riders. Paragraphs and pages later, when I got to my stop in Brookline, I would emerge from my swim, put my book in my bag, then walk the rest of the way to Ran’s underground, filled-to-the-brim apartment with the horizontal windows like narrowed eyes hovering street level at the top of the walls.

I was one of a tiny army of people who worked for Ran. I’d taken over the job from my friend Dawn and was there, like she had been, to do small administrative tasks: jot down errands and reminders; transcribe the letters (real ones, not emails) he continually sent out; and make note of the labels he wanted me to type up for the new videos he'd added to his library during the week (he recorded everything—60 Minutes, Dateline, the CMA Awards, old movies, and for a while a Spanish language teaching show on PBS that for a few episodes featured a little brown dog who had lost his way in Barcelona, thus enabling viewers to learn to say in Spanish such dynamic conversation starters as: “Excuse me.” and “Have you seen my dog?” and “No, he isn’t big; he is little and brown.”). Every week there were more letters: praises and ruminations to authors of books he had just finished; advise to students from cities as far away as Bombay and Tokyo, who had emailed him for input about their goals and abilities; and short notes simply saying thank you to people who had come by, called, or sent him a package in the mail.

Ran taught at the New England Conservatory of Music (still does). He had friends all over the world. He was a great cook. He was co-founder of the Third Stream department with Gunther Schuller at the conservatory in 1973 (It’s now called the Contemporary Improv Department). And, most importantly of all, he had infinite faith in the primacy of the ear. If someone were to say to me: “Tell me something about Ran,” these are just a few of the things I would say. But not necessarily in that order.

Before Ran, I had never heard of Third Stream; nor did I know too much about Contemporary Improv. These days I don’t want to imagine the world without it.

***

When I was 38, I almost died. And stunned everyone around me (myself included) with two heart attacks followed by emergency bypass surgery. It was a rare event in which the arteries on the top of my heart started to split. If they had ruptured, that would have been it. I was lucky: My surgeon knew what he was looking at when he saw my angiogram—knew he wasn’t looking at plaque about to rupture or your average hardened, narrowed artery, but something much more severe—and he knew he needed to act fast. I was lucky my body decided to enact its riotous convulsions when I was in Nashville, a city where all the hospitals in town want bragging rights when it comes to excellent cardiac care, instead of somewhere else, like Binghamton, New York, or Ellensburg, Washington—two much smaller cities where I’ve also lived, where I likely wouldn't have fared nearly as well.

  

Last night, while lying in bed thinking about my heart and about the way many of my attempts to write poetry about my summer of almost dying have been no more than that, I thought about Ran. About all those Sundays we spent together: the conversations, the video clips we’d sit and watch over lunch (he liked to include bits of dialogue in his video library log and we would often rewind and review the episodes about which I was taking notes); all the words I transcribed (words that I can’t help imagine would make the most incredibly dynamic word cloud in the world); the lunches and the way he would combine foods in unexpected ways; and eventually, the walks we would take to the farmer’s market in the spring. I don’t know why he or those days came to mind when I was thinking about my attempts to write my heart, but I decided to pay attention. With a willingness that would make Freud proud were I to jump into a time machine and become one of his patients spewing out my history while he listened in silence, I embraced the mind in all its strangeness: opted to let it flow on its own accord—as serpentine, circuitous, labyrinthine as it pleased. Trust enough to let yourself fall, and you’ll end up in a place you never would have imagined. Sometimes, this can be a good thing. At the very least, it will be revealing.

As I conducted this mental inventory of the writing that hadn’t worked—because it came in combinations of words that felt too dramatic, facile, mythic, and somehow false—compared with the writing (including some lines from the shoddy pile) that had, I started to notice that the writing I like followed a similar pattern: it came up from behind, embraced my heart from the side, surprised it through imagined scenarios and narratives, and most of all it was writing that trusted its medium enough to simply let it be, in whatever form it took—even when the words that came out were vernacular, banal, and didn’t “sound” poetic in the slightest.

This entire inner query ultimately prompted me—in my eye-masked, ear-plugged, and nighttime cocooned-up-tight state—to challenge myself to a narrative exercise. I asked myself: what story would you tell about your heart if you started talking about it in plain language, with no preconceptions of the story’s form or its literary parameters, with no ideas of how it should be, or how you as an overly constructed “survivor” should tell it? I let my mind wander (easier to do when one is in that space just before the body abandons itself to its nightly mini-death) and within a few seconds, “About 10 years ago, when I lived in Cambridge, I worked for a piano player name Ran,” passed through my mind. I didn’t expect it, but followed it for a few paragraphs before falling asleep. This morning I remembered and stopped to write that sentence down.

One of the lessons I take from improv: follow without asking why.

Another: if something strikes you grab on.

***

To listen to Ran play was to watch (and feel) someone transform, to move from dusty-basemented afternoons of wrinkled shirts, cluttered rooms, untied shoes, and the occasional echo of lunch lingering in a soft, white beard into that extraordinary sort of moment when a sudden, welcome (even if you didn’t know you wanted it) fissure appears in the universe. When the world as you know it—the ordinariness of a room, some scuffed chairs, worn out patches of carpet, a broken blind dangling over a window, dirty snow melting off boots—is gone, when the mundane rings with a voice so physically alive that what is expected out of a moment is split wide open, turned inside-out, as its inhabitants are invited into a secret space behind a veil they didn’t know existed, a space they aren’t even sure they will know how to take in, a sublime moment when you realize you are in the midst of something unique, a putting together of body and notes that never existed until then. A combination that won’t ever happen again. A body and notes that feel much larger than everyone in the room combined.  

This could be referred to, more simply or directly perhaps, as the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience—for the listeners and the performer, both of who get lost when art is that incredible. But to say that wouldn’t do (all the wonderfully delicious associations evoked by the mere utterance of the word ecstasy aside). Because if I were to write: listening to the piano player, one felt the ecstasy of the aesthetic experience, I would skip right over the flesh—his, ours, the flesh of the experience itself—and the color and heat of our transformation. When I write of him playing, the way he felt, I want to hone in on the bodies in the rooms. If I were to show it to you, I would direct you to his fingers, to his head bent over so low it seems as if any moment he will kiss the keyboard, his curved back, the sound of his foot pressing down on the pedal. I would point out the darkness, the small cone of light glowing golden around his body, and the people in the audience who bow their heads and close their eyes—not to a god, but to music. I would tell you to stop and listen to the long, full silence that rises up between the performance and the applause and lasts longer than you might expect. Though he has finished no one is ready for it to be over, or break the spell with the slap, slap, slapping of their enthusiastic—now sweaty, together let’s make a thunderstorm—hands.

***

Last night I caught a glimpse of myself standing in Ran’s bathroom. It was late summer. Some of his students were over and I could hear them laughing with him in his studio down the hall. I was washing my hands, and when I glanced up at my reflection in the mirror, I paused: there was someone familiar looking back, someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. The woman in my reflection looked happy, more alive than she’d been in months. 

My years in Cambridge were a strange time for me—most of them spent living with a man I should have never lived with in a city I should never have been in, because I never should have followed him there. I was dreadfully unhappy—for some months (I realize in hindsight) I was deeply depressed. So depressed I didn’t leave the house for days on end, couldn’t talk myself into going out no matter what I tried. 

Sometimes, I think of it now and I am incredulous. I was living in CAMBRIDGE after all: a city that, even if I shouldn’t have been there, was at the same time exactly the kind of place I had for so much of my life absolutely craved. I lived just minutes away from the line where the Charles River separates the city from Boston, in the midst of art museums, galleries, writers, conservatories, music at every turn, cinema, architecture, all that creative and intellectual energy to feast on, but for my first few years I didn’t see it. I had forgotten to open my eyes. I looked at, lived in, and feasted from the refrigerator and its salty-sweet promises instead. I gained so much weight that when I finally started noticing and stepped on a scale I wasn’t sure I was the same person. I was shocked when I finally noticed how I was living, and realized I had been hiding in some dark space I thought was comfort. By the time I started working for Ran, I was slowly making my way out into the world again. I was still blinking a lot and gun shy (As we know from Plato, it takes time to adjust when you’ve been living in a cave, when you finally stop to notice the sun.). But slowly my eyes were adjusting to the world outside of my own dark once again. The blinks were fewer and further between. I became more open. When I talked to people, I was actually meeting their gaze. 

Last night, I saw myself standing there and remembered exactly how I felt that day—smiling in the mirror, realizing I was going to be alright. I was wearing a V-neck tee. In the mirror, I had no scar.

For part 2 click here